online friendships

If you’ve never heard the term before, Ann Mack, director of trend spotting for JWT (the largest advertising agency in the U.S.), uses the term “digitivity denizens” to describe those of us who straddle two worlds, the real world and the digital one.

 

According to a report by Reuters, the agency surveyed more than 1000 Americans to find out how technology was changing their lives and behavior. We’ve come a long way, baby. Only a fifth of the respondents said they felt comfortable remaining offline for a week...

Canadian Jenny Bullough calls her blog The Newbie: The adventures of a wide-eyed innocent in the digital world. Since I’m a bit of a newbie to the blogosphere myself, I was interested to read Jenny’s take on Redefining Friendship.

She writes: “I'm stoked to be going shopping in Second Life twice in the next few days -- tonight for skins, and Monday with the After a Fashion gang for bikinis. Not just because I've been hankering for a new skin, and a bikini to properly show it off, but because it gives me a chance to socialize with my dear friends Eden and Kate.”

If you’ve been living under a rock like me and haven’t signed on or even heard about it yet, Second Life (SL) is a 3-D virtual world that has enticed more than 7 million members from around the globe since it was created in late 2006...

A report of the Pew Internet & American Life Project looked at online friendships among American youth between the ages of 12 and 17. One of many interesting findings: There were gender differences in the ways the sites were used. Girls used them to reinforce existing friendships; boys used them to flirt and make new friendships.

The researchers found that more than half (55 percent) of the 935 youth they interviewed visit such popular social networking sites as Facebook and MySpace.

Carole* (who prefers to use a pseudonym) is a 40-something career woman who works in the area of information technology. It’s no surprise that the internet has become one of her favorite playgrounds for making friends.

In this candid interview, Carole shares her own experience with online friendships and makes some insightful comparisons between these and offline ones...

With the growing popularity of social networking sites like My Space and Facebook, we are witnessing a paradigm shift that may well redefine the nature of friendship, suggests Libby Brooks, an editor with the UK Guardian, in a recent blog post, What’s in a Friendship. She points out a demographic divide: Almost one of every two teenagers has an online profile compared to only one in five adults.

What are your thoughts? Are online friendships qualitatively the same as those off-line? Are they harder or easier to make? Are they richer or more superficial? Are the friendships more fleeting? Are they just as rewarding as the real thing?